TIL Children as young as eight can and have been put on the sex offender registry, which lasts the rest of their lives.
Sex Offender Registration of Children (SORNA) | Juvenile Law Center
My sister was nearly put on the registry when she was 15 for slapping a friends butt in school who had decided she didn’t want to be friends with her anymore but hadn’t exactly communicated it. She chose to communicate that by accusing her of SA.
My sister avoided the registry by a mix of community service and counseling, but I always thought it was wild that she was at risk while under 18.
You aren't old enough to consent to sex but you are old enough to be charged with sex crimes. Bizarre
I don't really think it's bizarre. Sex crimes and consensual sex are two very different things. The issue here is that some people seem to be facing consequences that last a lifetime for 'crimes' that seem pretty insignificant. But if someone raped another person you'd expect them to face consequences even if they are underage when committing the offence.
Sexting though?
Oh sure, that shouldn't be considered a sex crime unless an adult is manipulating a child into sending them pics, in which case only the adult should be charged with anything.
I think it's pretty reasonable to say that, if someone can't consent to sex because they're underdeveloped, they probably also don't know what they're actually doing with regards to sex crimes. In that case, yeah, I think charging someone under 18 with a sex crime is bizarre.
Yeah, I remember when everyone was starting to get decent camera phones and then news articles started popping up about high schoolers being picked up by the FBI for producing child porn by sending nudes, and their girlfriend/boyfriend for seeing them. There was a bit of panic, that was then promptly ignored because "it'd never happen to us".
Can't imagine how different someones life would be if they were tagged as a sex offender before even turning 18.
"Did you or did you not ride your big wheel within 100 ft of an elementary school? Just answer the question Timmy."
This brings up a pretty surreal question. If an 8 year old is out on the registry how the fuck do they go to school or daycare or anything? If they can't go within certain distances of these areas. Imagine not being about to take your 9 year old to the fuckin park.
Pretty sure that's the biggest reason why zoomers turned into such prudes
I feel completely disconnected... do you mean that zoomers are prude compared to previous generations (I didn't know that) and that's because of the fear of getting caught on camera for making saucy jokes/comments?
Essentially, yes. Not wholly due to that, of course, but that's a powerful push at an impressionable age.
Thank you
Prudes? How so
Gen Z statistically is having much less sex than previous generations. But more importantly, attitudes towards sex are much more negative. Being "ace" is cool. "Consent" has been taken to a ridiculous extreme, to the point that women (it's always women...note the insidious underlying conservative tones) are seen as unable to consent to sex with men under almost any circumstances.
It's an unholy union of the misogyny and repressive attitudes of the Right, combined with misandry and cancel culture of the Left. It takes some of the worst parts of both.
Plus it capitalizes on the current "pedophiles around every corner" moral panic.
Look around Lemmy and you'll see it a lot. Being a normal horny teenager is deeply uncool right now.
Yeah I don't think this is completely true. I'm not in Gen Z but close enough and I do see that they're a lot more accepting of a broad spectrum of attitudes toward sex, and that includes asexuality, but I think they're also quite accepting of people being quite the opposite of that. I think where they get more weirded out and are willing to say so is when people - and because of patriarchy, it's almost always men, but not always toward women - make sexual comments about real people who aren't explicitly inviting that. That's something that has been declining in acceptability over time anyway and Gen Z just more commonly takes it a bit farther, and has a better understanding of consent. But I've really never seen this "women aren't capable of consenting" thing outside of a strawman for people who want to pretend it exists by misinterpreting real criticism.
make sexual comments about real people who aren't explicitly inviting that
Listen, if cat-calling and unwanted comments go away because of Gen Z, they'll have my undying gratitude. As it stands I'm just waiting to age into invisibility.
It probably won't, but I think it will get better.
No one explicitly says it, because then it could be called out as misogyny.
It's usually dressed up as "men are sexual predators / patriarchy power imbalance / anything cishet and ESPECIALLY cishet male is just uncool / etc"
It's not an explicit proscriptive thing. It's just that if you are a sexually liberated straight woman, that's nebulously Bad.
There's definitely been a sort of.. new flavor of conservatism spring up on the left. I would say it was more mid and late era millennials who started really demanding people fall in line though. Gen-Z just sorta inherited the mess. I expect there to be a rebound effect here soon, as this over-sensitivity/over-accommodation/censorship culture is unworkable long term. We're monkeys wearing business suits inside a violent exploitive natural world. Everything we do harms someone somewhere.
How do you transfer what you wrote to people having more or less intercourse? Where is the connection?
General social dysfunction leading to people being scared of each other, or just giving up on human interaction because of the risks or frustrations we're creating.
Without getting a signed legal consent document in advance, how do you as a young person prove that any sex act was consensual? You can't, usually. This can breed crippling fear of real life encounters.
You believe people of Gen Z have less sex because there is crippling fear of having sex without a legal consent document?
The political/sociological climate tends to affect these things. Combine that with the super easy access to porn and other online options, along with financial strain, and it begins to look like a compelling set of sociological pressures. I haven't gone out an done a research study, but it seems like a possible train of thought.
I also wonder how much effect an abundance of other options to entertain yourself in general has on the frequency of sex.
For Germany there are statistics that children and teenagers go out less and have smaller friend groups for various reasons. One discussed reason is a shift to favour solitary activities at home (video games, YouTube, Netflix, etc.).
I don't see why the same wouldn't be true for young adults and adults as well. And then they turn on Tinder and hope that somehow a sex partner falls out of the clouds and doesn't mind their untrained social skills.
Can you please link to these statistics? Because I only find news articles on web sites with no statistics either, just various degrees of sensationalism without anything backing up their claims with concrete numbers or how and whom they surveyed.
Very first Google result links to several studies: https://www.newsweek.com/whats-driving-gen-zs-aversion-sex-opinion-1638228
You do know that Google results are different, for different people, right?
This also all seems to regard the US only, OP made it seem like this was a general trend.
The Juvenile Law Center is an American institution that deals with American juveniles.